TURNING POINT.

More Equal Than Others

Encounter With Bias Leads To A Career Of Seeking Fairness

February 18, 1996|By Heather M. Little. Special to the Tribune.

Joyce E. Tucker will never forget the day in January 1972 when she was passed over for promotion, from counselor to supervisor, in favor of a less-experienced white male at the Tinley Park Mental Health Center.

"My first reaction was one of total surprise," Tucker recalled during a recent visit to Chicago, where she grew up.

"It never occurred to me that I would not be promoted. Like most people, I compared my work performance with those around me, and I knew I was doing a good job.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published Feb. 25, 1996:Corrections and clarifications.A story on Joyce Tucker, a commissioner with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in the Feb. 18 edition of WOMANEWS stated she won a federal lawsuit filed on her behalf by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The suit was filed by the National Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities and attorney William Caruso. The Tribune regrets the error.

"I was a dedicated and competent employee who related well both to clients and colleagues. Yet out of four individuals being considered for three new supervisory positions, I was the one excluded."

Tucker's surprise quickly turned to anger when she asked her boss why he refused her the promotion.

"Because I'm a male chauvinist pig, and I can do whatever I please, that's all," Tucker recalled his response. "I sat there for a moment, completely speechless. Then I collected my thoughts and told him he needn't think he could do whatever he pleased to me."

By representing herself in a grievance action before the now-defunct Illinois Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1973, Tucker ultimately got her promotion.

That same year she won a precedent-setting federal lawsuit filed on her behalf by the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Fair Housing Law against a landlord who denied her and a black girlfriend a Gold Coast rental apartment.

These highly personal experiences of sexual and racial discrimination prompted Tucker to pursue a law degree at John Marshall Law School in Chicago and to embark on a career fighting discrimination from a position of power rather than of weakness.

Since 1990, Tucker, 47, has been on the front lines of the nation's battle against discriminatory practices in the workplace. As one of five commissioners appointed by the president to the bipartisan Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in Washington, she helps shape policy and approves all litigation undertaken by the agency, whose mandate is to ensure equality of opportunity by enforcing federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.

Tucker also heads one of three task forces established in November 1994 by EEOC chairman Gilbert F. Casellas to study ways of reducing the backlog of approximately 108,000 pending cases, up from 63,000 four years ago.

During her long career in government, Tucker has received widespread professional recognition, including the 1992 John Marshall Law School Distinguished Alumnus Award and the 1991 National Institute for Employment Equity Milestone Award for Civil Rights. In 1990 she was inducted into the Chicago Women's Hall of Fame, and the same year Dollars & Sense Magazine named her one of the Ten Outstanding Business and Professional People nationwide.

Tucker said she strives to enhance the effectiveness and public image of an agency she considers vital to the American people but one that is severely overworked and underfunded.

The EEOC has a $223 million annual budget and almost 3,000 employees, with 770 investigators handling 100-plus cases at any given time.

"Most of our civil rights laws are sound, but legislation without adequate resources for enforcement is like a toothless tiger attempting to chew up the meat of discrimination with just its bare gums," Tucker said.

"As commissioners we must aspire to doing our best in every case, but with such enormous backlogs, public confidence in our ability to provide swift justice is understandably eroded. At the same time, I know we don't have all the answers, but I firmly believe in an organized, step-by-step approach to handling the problems."

Tucker learned early to face issues head-on and logically. Her maternal grandmother, with whom she, her parents and two sisters lived for many years on Chicago's West Side, instilled in her a faith in her own abilities.

In 1959, after her parents separated, Tucker and her younger sister Yasmin went to live in suburban Maywood with their uncle Dr. Maceo Ellison, his wife and two daughters.

"With all girls in the household and my being the eldest, I routinely mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges and shoveled snow," Tucker recalled. "One summer day I ran to tell my uncle the lawnmower wasn't working. Instead of taking over, as many adults would have, he instructed me to figure out what was wrong. After a while I determined the machine was out of gas. I ran back and told him. Still he didn't take over. He advised me to figure out what to do next.

"Well, I got so tired of running back and forth that I decided to figure out the whole plan before showing my face again: need to get a gas can, need to get some money, need to go to the gas station, need to get a receipt and so on.